Salt and Sea Wind
by Elliott Silver
Summary: When Christy and her daughter Catherine go back to Cutter Gap at the beginning of the novel, over 46 years have passed since she left the Cove. What happens in that time, and why doesn't Christy go back sooner?


Title: Salt and Sea Wind

Author: Elliott Silver

Summary: When Christy and her daughter Catherine go back to Cutter Gap at the beginning of the novel, over 46 years have passed since she left the Cove. What happens in that time, and why doesn't Christy go back sooner?

Author's Note: This follows my previous story, Sourwood and Sweet Maple, although you probably could read this alone.

* * *

"We're here," Catherine said, breathing deeply in the November air.

The stark outline of the old mission house stood clearly against the ridges of the Smokies, against the blank space where Miss Alice's cabin had once been. Almost fifty years ago, I had stood in this exact spot, a young girl who had just turned twenty, full of passion and conviction. Behind me there had been the clatter of pots and pans, of Miss Ida scraping up supper. There was a chill on the wind, and the sun was falling as if it might never stop, already casting the far ridges in moon-shadow. I stepped off the porch and headed away from the setting sun, towards silence, towards darkness, towards him.

Catherine took my hand and held it. We began walking east, into the past.

* * *

The November cold of 1912 had been broken by a sudden thaw, and a new rash of typhoid cases. We were lucky, and only four more in the Cove became sick. Big Lick and Cataleechie were not so lucky, and Miss Alice sent us a note that she was staying away until further notice.

Winter, fickle and sharp, returned with a vengeance, and there was the sparkle of frost on the windowpanes of David's bunkhouse as I went by, glittering with light. Inside he would be working over the week's sermon, waiting for the dinner-bell.

It began to snow as I kept walking, wisping flurries that clung to my coat and gloves as I passed through the winter woods. The cabin rose like a dream in front of me, the door half-open, bleeding light and heat into the cold night. I saw Neil, or rather his shadow, and the great crescent-clatter of the wide axe as he swung it, splitting wood. I stood in the darkness watching him, the bend and rise of his stocky body as he gathered up shucked logs, stacking them in his muscular arms. I could hear the crunch of frost beneath his feet as he stepped to the porch.

I breathed as he paused, reaching the door and turning and looking into the night. He cast a long shadow into the darkness, a silhouette that nearly touched to my toes, as if he was always reaching for me.

I walked forward, into the wedge of light, and heard his voice calling my name. He dropped the logs and came to me, pulling me with him into the warm rooms. My teeth began chattering as he sat me near the fire, piling it high with dry wood until sparks flew and flames licked at my hands. I hadn't even realized I'd been so cold. Outside true dark had fallen now, and not even the stars lit the night. It was too late to go back, if I had even considered it.

I had come to him weeks ago. We had stood here in this very space, and I had kissed him. Now I reached for him again, took his warm hand in my cold one, and pulled him to me. He came, kneeling next to me, and I traced the lines of his rugged face with my fingertips. Snow melted from my clothes, beading water on the thick wool cloth. I felt it, damp and prickly, against my skin.

I couldn't imagine what my mother, my friends in Asheville, might say, but this was my choice, my life.

I bent my head and touched my lips to his again.

"Christy - " He rose quickly and held me at arm's length. "You don't know what you're doing."

Standing there with him in his cabin, the snow blowing in the darkness outside, I knew.

"Yes, I do," I argued, facing him. "I know exactly what I'm doing."

I touched his shoulders, and almost on tip-toe, touched my mouth to his again. I could feel his heart pounding, faster than mine even, but he was warm and tasted a little like coffee, dark and bittersweet. His hazel eyes burned as he looked at me.

"If I start, I won't be able to stop."

"I know."

* * *

I would look back on those days in Cutter Gap among the happiest in my life. We stayed in the mountains until the end of the harvest term, and said our final goodbyes just as the first cold snap hit the Cove, just after the birth of our daughter Catherine. The trees were burnished red and orange, the valley flooded with a carpet of flames as we walked the final steps to the El Pano train station. Neil was anxious to start his work with Dr Fuchs in Vienna, and after a month with my parents in Asheville, I followed him with Catherine in the mild December of 1913.

I hardly remember Vienna, its classical Ringstrasse of boulevards where Catherine and I spent our mornings, enjoying the smell of butter-pastries and hot chocolate. The outbreak of war consumed Europe that next August, and with the news of Austria-Hungary's alliance with ambitious Germany, we left for London, for safety. The city was grey and tense, and as we stood under a rainy sky near Hyde Park Corner, there was the sound of bagpipes, the clatter of Scottish troops, the fusiliers and the highland infantry, passing by.

Neil's eyes followed them until they were gone.

"I can't let them go alone," he said.

Neil signed as a doctor, and despite his best arguments, I went with him. He was against it, as were my parents, who were aghast at the very thought of it, and even Miss Alice had her doubts, carefully voiced in letters brimming with her sparse, elegant handwriting.

"You are my husband," I said to him, as we stood in the grey London fog, his hand laced through mine. "My place is with you."

Catherine struggled in my arms, reaching for him, and he took her against his chest. She snuggled against him, and he held her tight. She bound us together.

"Wherever you go," I continued. "Whatever happens, I want to be with you."

We were posted, together, to the French and Belgian front, at a military hospital near the infantry lines at Liesele, not far from the cathedral town of Ypres, which we all called "Wipers." Though I'd had enough experience in the Cove, nothing could have prepared me for the western front. It was March when we arrived, a month of wheat shoots and apple blossoms, but the land was scarred by blackened tree trunks, seas of mud, trails of barbed wire. Ruined church spires dotted the skyline, hollow hulls for snipers and crows. Behind the tented medical buildings, graves were marked with wooden crosses, and the men we saw at breakfast might be buried in Flanders mud at noon. It was a brown life of duckboards and carrier pigeons, of waiting for dusk to retrieve the dead from no-man's-land. Lice and trench-foot were common, and in those first winter months frost etched eulogies in the floor of the surgery.

I went as a wife and mother, for Neil and Catherine, but there was a shortage of doctors on the front, especially here, and anyone with medical experience was quickly pressed into service. I had only just put Catherine to sleep one night when Neil came, his hazel eyes bloodshot with lack of sleep.

"I need your help," he said simply, and I followed him until we reached the hospital.

" No – " I said when I realized. "I can't –"

"But you helped with Little Burl – "

"That was different," I argued, swallowing hard. "What if I fold up on you?"

Suddenly I was nineteen year-old Christy Huddleston again, walking into the sparkling snow of Cutter Gap and seeing the vicious red-brown stains of blood and fur, the wreckage of life torn apart. I felt light-headed just remembering.

"You won't," Neil said and there was such certainty in his voice. "You won't fold when I need you."

He squeezed my hand, and I managed a weak smile as I followed him into the surgery. I asked God for strength I didn't know I had, to not fail Neil, or the injured men who needed me most, to not fail Him.

I walked into the room behind my husband, my hands numbed by the icy wash. A boy as young as Lundy or Rob Allen lay on the narrow table, the place where his stomach ought to have been a writhing tangle of bloodied cloth and grey-blue intestines. Suddenly my head spun and I grasped the edge of the table for support. It must have woken him, because his eyelids fluttered as he looked at me.

"Are – are you an angel?" Creed had once asked me this question, and I shook my head.

"No, I'm not," I answered, "but I'm here to help you." My voice shook, and I wasn't sure I could even help myself. I looked over to Neil, but he was readying silver instruments, laying them on a small table in precise lines, like geography, as if he could map how to fix people. He had such confidence, such faith, even, or especially, in me.

"Can you?" the boy asked.

"Of course," I answered. "And I'm going to stay right here with you."

He winced on the table as Neil came and began to pull strips of cloth from his wounds. Clumsily his small hand found mine, this hand that had held rifles and lobbed artillery, and I took it, holding it as tightly as I could.

Neil handed me a cotton wad damp with chloroform and I held it over the boy's nose and mouth, watching as his eyes closed and his body relaxed. I looked away as Neil began, willing myself to look anywhere but the maimed flesh of the boy's body. But death and life were different sides of the same coin and I turned back, I had to. I watched the kerosene lantern in the corner, the flash of light and flame behind Neil's shoulder. I watched Neil's hands, swift and sure. I watched, for miracles.

And then Neil was done, and I moved stiffly from my perch as he washed the blood from his hands and a soldier, tall and dark as a shadow, came in and wheeled the boy into the next ward. Another carried in an older man, groaning and clutching a shattered leg. Neil turned and I caught his hazel eyes. Without thinking, I pulled a clean apron from the shelf, smoothing it over my head, and plunged my hands into the basin of cold water, scrubbing furiously at them with the brown soap. I was angry, angry with God for letting it come to this, this fight between boys who spoke different languages. I didn't understand, couldn't understand, and so I brought bandages and hot water, ash splints to set the leg, and measured out iodine and antibiotic from neatly-labeled bottles. If I had gone to Cutter Gap to teach, I was here to help, to heal, to save, because God certainly was not. With each patient that came to Neil, I knew I was here because I was needed, and that was all I needed to know.

It was not a place for children, but Catherine loved the wards of wounded men, and she would screech and teeter from one outstretched hand to another. She loved the shiny things the men, crumbled on their beds, could produce from their pockets, harmonicas and mirrors and the bright shell casings of bullets. There were hours of haste and other hours of waiting, wiling away, when she and I would make our rounds together, wandering throughout this endless sea of wounded men and torn bodies with tea and letters. When Neil called, there was always a clamor to look after her, and I eventually learned that, even so young, Catherine could quite easily take care of herself. Catherine, too, was a healer.

By May of 1915, the German offensive pushed at Ypres for the second time. I woke to the rumble of shelling, and the rustle of Christian, the young boy who's hand I had held, rushing me awake. There was a distant smell, like pepper and pineapple, and the harsh rattle of phlegmy coughing everywhere. I ran outside, into the swarm and commotion, until I found Neil.

"Gas," he explained, his hand on my shoulder. I realized he was shaking. "They're using chlorine gas."

In rooms where men had bled and died, they now coughed up their own lungs from chlorine and phosgene, but Neil persevered, stubbornly. Within a year the soldiers became younger and younger, until they were all the age of Little Burl and Creed, until not even Neil could save them from German bullets and shell fragments and invisible, poisoned air. Lines of hacking men, bound to green stretchers, dotted the scarred landscape. Still, we fought on, and for what? I wanted to ask God, but I had stopped talking to Him, believing in Him even. How could He sanction this slaughter, these stupid, meaningless deaths?

But one day the tears came and I couldn't stop them. I ran out into the cold, bright sunlight, running across the transport lines and seas of huddled men. I ran past them all to the field behind the ruins of the medieval market hall. It was June now, and the land was awash in red, waves of flaming poppies as far as I could see. I waded into them, running the palms of my hands over their soft petals and fuzzy stems until my knees gave way and I collapsed into the soft dirt.

I cried for Little Burl and Miss Alice, for Neil and Catherine and the new child that was growing inside me, for all the men trapped here in this mud-filled world, where only the larks above reminded us that there was more than this, more than death.

I cried until I had no more tears, until I saw Neil's broad shoulders and just visible above the blowing flowers, a small red head.

Catherine came as she always did, joyously and at speed.

Neil sank beside me, took me in his arms as the sun fell over us. Together we turned our faces to its warmth.

"How can God do this, how can He let this happen?"

"This isn't God's work," Neil said quietly. "It's ours."

His hands closed over mine, and the tears dried on my face. Remember, Miss Alice had once written, he is your strength and you are his. That night, as Catherine slept beside us, we sought comfort in each other, blindly, moving to the sound of the wind outside, the harsh static of shelling somewhere in the distance. As if in seeking each other we would find a solution for this war. Perhaps, if nothing else, I believed in this, in him, in last good things like love.

A week later a sniper's ball shattered Neil's leg in the thick darkness of the field, where he and four other soldiers were gathering the dead. Infection set in quickly, and he lapsed dangerously into delirium and fever. A German offensive broke the next day, cutting off all lines of supply, and we could only nurse him with our prayers, Catherine's small fingers touching his larger ones as I barricaded the army-surgeon from our rooms, from taking his leg. In the darkness, I lay beside my husband, beside our sleeping child. Together we waited, and after so many months of silence, I spoke to God, asking Him to save this man. I had nothing to give Him but our love, and if that wasn't enough, I didn't know what was. But I had to believe, needed to believe, and I prayed. At dawn, Neil's voice broke through the gunfire and artillery shells, the stink of smoke and flesh. His hand came to rest on my forehead, heavy and clumsy, and then on my risen belly. Under his palm, our son kicked furiously.

Two weeks later, he was discharged and we sailed to Canada, settling on Cape Breton Island. Our son Kirk was born two months later in August, a month after the terrible offensive of third Ypres and Passchendaele in 1916 and two long years before the blessed armistice.

These were happy years, bundled into our tiny cottage above Ingonish, golden as the sun that shone on the coastal waters, smooth as glass, as our dreams. Neil limped now, but we would walk on the stony shorelines, rank with seaweed and kelp, Catherine and Kirk exploring tidal pools and creatures tossed from the sea, little sacrifices to the earth. Neil and I would sit on the rocks, holding hands, turning our faces towards the sun, but the silence was never the same as Cutter Gap. We had seen too much now, and we knew all we had was this, these lives, each other. It was enough.

"Do you regret this," he asked one day.

Catherine dipped her bare toes in the rolling water and squealed. I thought of the Cove, of the war, of this high place of sea and salt wind, of the man behind me. Neil had once told me that the Gaelic language had no words for possession, that the words for forest were "the trees before me," that wife was "the woman who is with me." I was with him, with Neil, always.

"I can't imagine my life," I said, "without you."

Somewhere not far away the children laughed and it was a beautiful sound, the sound of my dreams.

Years passed easily and we lived from season to season. Neil tended to sailors and seamen, and sometimes the coal miners of nearby Sydney, wizened men with milky eyes and black lashes on their skin, where coat dust had gotten into cuts and healed them black. On sunny days the children would run down to the harbor on the old stage road to bring back fish for supper, and then Neil would look at me or I would turn to him and we would go inside together, closing the door behind us. It was always new and very old, achingly familiar, the calluses of his hands on the softness of my skin.

Sometimes we danced at the local ceilidhs in Ingonish Harbour, the sound of toe and heel, of fiddle and tin whistle, rattling the very rafters of the whitewashed buildings. Music welled around us, old songs of Neil's ancestors, of thistle and pipes, of exodus and battle, of home. They played so many songs, airs and jigs and reels, that I was always dizzy with them all. Neil and I danced as we had at Ruby Mae's wedding, whirling, his arms strong and sure around me as his love.

These were years of peace. Though there might have been much else happening in the world, we rarely felt it, bundled away as we were on the island. These were years of tree change, of charting time in leaves and flower, the way the birch, hawthorn, and larch shifted color, the way harebells and marsh mallow gave way to goldenrod. Kirk had my laugh and vehemence, but Catherine had her father's hands, and sometimes his temper, and she often followed him on his rounds. None of us were surprised when she applied to the Boston Medical School, followed by invitations from the finest hospitals in the States.

In 1939, in the midst of a red-gold September, the world flared into war again. Neil was fifty-three, and there was silver shot through his still-tousled hair. Now it was Kirk who served, enlisting and taking nothing but his fiddle and happy laugh. We saw him off in Halifax, his blue eyes sparkling as he waved goodbye.

The letter came on a Tuesday in the bright July of 1943. The war office sent only a note of condolences but his commander had enclosed the silver medal Kirk had won at Dieppe and a note that he'd been buried at the Canadian War Cemetery near Agira, in Sicily.

Neil came in and I looked at him through wet eyes. Slowly, unwillingly, I offered him the silver cross in my hand. I'd held it so tightly that it had imprinted itself upon my palm. He held my hand for just a second, and then I watched him walk out into the sunshine. I pulled on my coat and headed to the Harbour to call Catherine. By the time I'd returned, it was dusk and the northern lights flared in the sky as I went to Neil, sitting alone on the shoreline where we, all of us, had walked so many times before. I sat with him until colors filled the sky, reds and greens and golds that swept over us. As dawn broke, we rose together and went to the edge of the ocean. The tides rocked in endlessly, whitecaps in the distance blowing in from the far edges of the world, perhaps even from that distant island where Kirk now rested. Neil walked into the waves and threw the silver medal far into the dark blue waters, where it disappeared with a flash and sparkle.

A golden eagle called from the pines, and then stretched out its great wings and flew.

* * *

In 1958, the year Catherine and I came back to Cutter Gap, Neil and I had already thought about coming home. With Kirk gone and Catherine grown, there was no reason to stay in Canada. By that time, President Roosevelt had signed an act to create the Great Smoky Mountains National Park. Many of the mountain people had already begun selling their land to the government, and soon everything I remembered above the Cove would be gone, grown back into the Cherokee wilds from which it had been so painstakingly built.

It was Catherine who suggested the long trip to Asheville, perhaps because she knew best. She wanted to travel on to the El Pano station and to see the beautiful mountains where I had come as a young girl in 1912, where I had fallen in love so fully, where she had been born.

She and I hiked up the path, now rutted and rocky, to the cabin. My heart pounded in my chest as I came around the last bend and saw its ghost-grey boards rising between the tall trees. We reached the porch, now uneven and sagging, and I thought about the last time I had stepped off these hewn planks almost fifty years ago, a young wife with a new baby in my arms. By some good fortune, the door was open, although there was no one around, and as Catherine explored the rooms and spaces she couldn't remember, I sat on the edge of the porch and closed my eyes. The mountain air snapped with autumn chill, but the afternoon sun was warm on my face.

* * *

"Will you marry me, Neil?" I had asked him that first night, and all the smile lines around his eyes crinkled.

"Are you asking me, or should I ask you?"

I opened my mouth, but he put a finger to my lips, lingering there.

"I want you to be my wife."

I was still cold, and he pulled the clothes damp with melting snow from my body until I stood there in almost nothing. He rubbed my skin until the feeling came back, until I was warm and alive.

There were few things I had been sure of in my life, of leaving home, coming here to Cutter Gap, teaching, learning, but it was not this love or this man. If this was a sin, and I couldn't believe God would think so, I would have it.

He was kissing my face, his words brushing my skin, and I realized he was speaking in that same musical language I'd heard before, that his words were Gaelic.

"What are you saying," I asked.

"I'm saying I love you," he answered, and with each touch, each breath, each look, he did.

Slowly I reached out for him, undoing the buttons on his shirt until my hands found his chest, sprinkled with red-blond hair like his arms. The rumble in his throat was his approval as I touched his skin, traced the lines of his arms, the ridges of his ribs, lingered over the beat of his heart.

He shed clothing until we both stood there bare before each other, bathed only in the flickering light of the fire. I waited for shame or fear but they never came, not even as Neil lifted me into his arms and laid me so tenderly on his bed.

I watched him as he stood there, breathing fast and deep, his body outlined against the fire, against the darkness, against the falling snow.

Then slowly, so slowly, he came to me, and I felt the weight of his body on mine. He kissed the edge of my throat, the line of my neck, and then lower, flicking the hard buds of my nipples with his tongue so that I cried out, twining my fingers in the tousled depths of his hair. He moved lower still, his fingers rubbing slow circles on the ticklish insides of my thighs. His tongue lapped there, until I was damp and shivering. Slowly he pushed my knees apart.

My breath caught in my throat, and Neil looked up, looked at me. I shivered, but his mouth slipped to my ear, whispering to me in that strange beautiful language. I gasped as he sucked on the lobe, pulling it between his teeth, so that I barely felt him move below, a slow push until I gave way, a bright flare of pain nearly forgotten in the long slide of him, as my breath came out in a single, beautiful gasp at the extent of it. We moved together, long and slow, our bodies sucking at each other until I felt him tense, the muscles in his arms go rigid, until he cried my name, until he rolled into me, holding me, loving me.

Outside the snow fell softly, blanketing the world in bridal white, as we clung to one another and slept in our dreams.

* * *

"You came early," I said, as Catherine came back to me. "It was as if you wanted to make sure you were born here."

"And I was." Catherine smiled, and in her I saw so much of her father.

"These are your mountains too," I said, "as much as they were ours."

I saw the shine of tears in her eyes as she turned away quickly. It had come so suddenly, so unexpected, like snow in the mountains. I remembered that morning clearly, the dip and wash of the waves against the shoreline, the song of the birds, the whisper of wind under the eaves. Catherine had called from Boston, and I went to tell Neil. I found him near the sea, listening to the waves. My heart stopped as it always did when I caught sight of him. He had just turned eighty, but he was no less beautiful than when I had first seen him that cold January night in the Spencer cabin, fighting as always to save life.

"You came to me in the snow that first night," he said as I came up to him. It was October now, and the leaf season had brought sightseers. I could hear their cars struggling on the old stage road as they headed to Sydney.

I sat with him, and he wrapped his hands in mine.

"Somehow I knew you'd come, and you did." He leaned back against the rock, closing his eyes. "I knew I just had to wait for you."

His voice was low, and there was something in it that reminded me of Fairlight.

"Neil," I said, squeezing his hand.

"I know," he whispered. "I will."

I turned to him, but his head was back, as if sleeping, a smile on his face as the last rays of sun lit upon his cheek.

I curled against him, resting my head on his silent chest, the sea wind licking the salt of my tears. I held his cooling hand in mine until dusk fell and brought with it darkness over the sea.

* * *

Wind whispered in the tall trees, rustling the last red maple leaves in the Smokies. There would be snow soon, I could feel it, but until then I turned my face into the fading afternoon sun, as I had so many times before.

"I'm here, Neil," I said. "I'm home."


End file.
